Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding • Hacker News Board

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#101

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:02 AM UTC

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #89

jacquesm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see a number of points in time where that goal could have been achieved much better than in the way it happened. For instance: instead of a single deal with a large tech company it should have been a financial deal shared between a syndicate. That would have been a lot safer than to give MS the keys to the kingdom. But she was on the board when that happened and presumably agreed to the deal or she could have r…

That's not obvious to me. Suppose OpenAI deliberately partners with a number of different infra providers. That creates a bunch of drag because they have to create a compatibility layer for staying agnostic to the underlying infra. And the outcome in a situation like this would probably be fairly similar: Since big tech companies are focused on making a buck, they would probably pressure the board to do whatever they…

> I'm seeing a lot of "Monday morning quarterback" in this thread

That's fine but you are not forced to participate.

> That's not obvious to me. Suppose OpenAI deliberately partners with a number of different infra providers. That creates a bunch of drag because they have to create a compatibility layer for staying agnostic to the underlying infra. And the outcome in a situation like this would probably be fairly similar: Since big tech companies are focused on making a buck, they would probably pressure the board to do whatever they think will be most profitable, just like Microsoft.

So, either you are 'OpenAI' and that means open to all or you are Microsoft AI, licensing your tech to one of the least ethical and most wealthy companies in the world. If the board didn't have anything to say about that at the time and if they didn't resign en masse you have to assume that they are ok with it.

> Additionally, the role of the board is to supervise the CEO, not make strategic decisions, no? If the MS partnership was a mistake, Sam is the primary person to blame here.

So are they or are they not there to supervise the CEO?

In my view a board exists to protect the interests of the stakeholders guided by a charter. OpenAI sees 'humanity' (whatever that means to them) as their stakeholders and that trumps each and every other party involved. But it is unclear whether their actions really benefit those stakeholders or if it is just people being people.

So far I'm seeing a lot of the latter and only little bits of the former.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#102

Post by nicce » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:03 AM UTC

winenbug wrote: post #74

ipaddr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promoting Anthropic and putting down OpenAI doesn't make her better at her job. Her job isn't self promotion.

Unless she has equity in Anthropic (which would be major conflict of interest), I don't see how this is self promotion...?

These guys are already millionaires. Do you think people writing these kinds of papers really are that greedy?

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#103

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:03 AM UTC

winenbug wrote: post #99

https://openai.com/our-structure This whole thing was so, SO poorly executed, but the independent people on the board were gathered specifically to prioritize humanity & AI safety over OpenAI. It sounds like Sam forgot just that when he criticized Helen for her research (given how many people were posting ways to "get around" ChatGPT's guardrails, she probably had some firm grounds to stand on). Yes, Sam made LLMs ma…

>they're two sides of an incredibly badly thought-of charter.

It's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight, but I haven't seen anyone in this discussion even suggest an alternative model that they claim would've been superior.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#104

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:04 AM UTC

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #100

jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting but it may well be they both have a point: Helen for telling him to get lost and Sam for attempting to remove her before she would damage the company. But she could have made that point more forcefully by not comparing Anthropic to OpenAI, after all who better than her to steer OpenAI in the right direction. I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least on…

>I noted in a comment elsewhere that all of these board members appear to have had at least one and some many more conflicts of interest. From the perspective of avoiding an AI race, conflict of interest could very well be a good thing. You're operating under a standard capitalist model, where we want the market to pick winners, may the most profitable corporation win.

I subscribe to capitalism, but not to that degree. I see it the same way I see democracy: flawed but I don't have anything better.

> From the perspective of avoiding an AI race, conflict of interest could very well be a good thing.

On the American subcontinent: yes. But the world is larger than that.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#105

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #75

jacquesm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project That bit I never understood. It doesn't even have a qualification as to who is stewarding the project as if any AI should be assisted no matter who ends up owning it. The whole thing is just so utterly disconnected from the real world.

If you believe that aligned AGI will create a post-scarcity society, there's no reason for its creator to hoard the benefits for themselves. The main thing is to ensure that post-scarcity society actually comes into being. Edit: Note also the "value-aligned, safety-conscious" caveat.

I don't believe that.

What I believe is that the first party to create an AGI will likely end up being nationalized and that that AI will be weaponized the next day to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#106

Post by nicce » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

snapwood wrote: post #97

winenbug wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless she has equity in Anthropic (which would be major conflict of interest), I don't see how this is self promotion...?

I'm guessing the reasoning is something like this... As a CEO I'd want your concerns brought to me so they could be addressed. But if they were addressed, that is one less paper that could be published by Ms. Toner. As a member of the openai board, seeing the problem solved is more important to openai than her publishing career.

On the other hand, you create more pressure for solving the problem by publishing acknowledged paper, if your voice is not usually heard

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#107

Post by wvenable » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

tapoxi wrote: post #63

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty heavily implied by OpenAI's charter: https://openai.com/charter It's weird to me that Helen is getting so much crap for upholding the charter. No one objected to the charter at the time it was published. The charter was always available for employees, investors, and customers to read. Did everyone expect it to be ignored when push came to shove? There's a lot of pressure on Helen right now from people who…

Investors wanted to have a commercial enterprise while pretending it was a nonprofit acting for the good of humanity. This helps market something as scary and potentially destructive as AI. "It can't be that bad, they're a nonprofit with altruistic goals!" Then the investors get mad when the board they intended to be figureheads actually try to uphold some principles. Best to rip the band-aid off and stop pretending.

I think you have it backwards. OpenAI specifically sought out investors because they couldn't fulfill their mission without the infrastructure to do it. Investors don't just give money away -- it's in the name itself -- they're investing. The point is for the commercial enterprise to provide a return on their investment.

OpenAI is a non-profit running this commercial enterprise but they are seemingly at odds with that enterprise. Investors should rightly be very concerned about the future of their investment.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#108

Post by rizky05 » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

brigadier132 wrote: post #33

PepperdineG wrote: post #3

>Ms. Toner disagreed. The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all of humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled. Now we know where that came from

Amazing how these higher minded people always forget about the little people on the ground. All these employees losing their livelihoods for the greater good. Not surprised an ethicist thinks like this.

[dead]

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#109

Post by interlocutor » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

jjulius wrote: post #90

breadwinner wrote: post #44

The main takeaway from this whole saga is, be careful who you allow on your board. Nearly everyone on OpenAI board is young, inexperienced and unqualified to be on the board of one of the most important companies on the planet. Here's Ms. Toner's linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-toner-4162439a/

>Nearly everyone on OpenAI board is young, inexperienced and unqualified to be on the board of one of the most important companies on the planet. Jumping off of that, I'm genuinely curious what, in Sam's resume, suggests he should be in charge of "one of the most important companies on the planet".

Wasn't he president of some kind of startup incubator? Some "combinator" company.

Re: Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

#110

Post by mikeryan » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #48

comp_throw7 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think trying to remove Toner for being a public author of that report is actually pretty out of line. (Note: the NYT article doesn't actually seem to provide evidence that Sam tried to get her removed from the board, though it sure does try to imply it real hard by reference to other things, like the email he sent criticizing her.)

Yes, agreed, that was uncalled for. But it is what probably a large number of CEOs would do.

I think it clearly represents the dichotomy of OpenAI’s structure. By its nature it created an adversarial position between the non-profit and for profit side with Sam and Toner representing those two poles.

I, personally, have a hard time picking sides here. On its face it seems that Ms Toner is more aligned with OpenAI’s stated mission.

However Sam seems much better suited to operating the company and being the “public face” of AI. One thing I’m pretty confident in is that the board isn’t capable of navigating OpenAI through the rough seas it’s currently in.

I think an argument could realistically be made to blow up the whole governance structure and reset with new principals across the board, that being said I don’t know who’d be a natural arbiter here.

At the end of the day the untenable spot Ms Toner is in is that the genie is out of the bottle which makes her position of allowing the company to self-destruct a bit tone deaf.